Healthicine

In dictionaries, and even in the World Health Organization, health is a noun.  You might have health, lose health or regain your health. Health is an adjective, is healthy walk, healthy diet, healthy attitude. Health is also a fake adjective: health clinic, health centre, health insurance – withan intention of marketing, not healthing: health clinic actually means sickness clinic, health centre might mean fitness centre, and health insurance is just a fancy name for medical insurance. We also use health as an interjection, when delivering a toast “Health!” And of course health can also be an adverb, as in running and eating healthily.

When have you seen health as a verb? Many nouns and adjectives have become verbs, as Calvin enjoys explaining to Hobbes. Fish is a noun – and a verb. Google was a noun, now it’s a verb too.

What about health?

What word says we are ‘improving our health’. Surely we are healthing our bodies.  Exercise and nutrition healths our bodies. Visualizing, imagining, understanding, meditating, and forgiving healths our minds, and our spirits. Healthy socializing healths our communities.

Today we don’t use health as a verb. Dictionaries don’t recognize that health is a verb.  Why not? Continue reading →

What is health?  What is healthiness? What is unhealthiness?  Where does illness fit into this picture?  What about aging? What are medicines? What are healthicines? Are alternative medicines healthicines?  No, they are not.

There are many definitions of health, few of healthiness. Illness, disease, and medical condition are technically defined by diagnosis, but many different definitions are used by doctors, patients, insurance companies, employers, etc. Aging too, has many definitions, depending on the goals of whoever is speaking. Continue reading →

What is wellness? How does ‘wellness’ relate to healthiness and illness? There are many definitions of wellness.  In Healthicine we define wellness as the absence of disease. You are either ill, or you are well.

Wellness is not healthiness. Illness is not the opposite of healthiness. The inverse of healthiness is unhealthiness.

Each of us has a unique level of healthiness, as in the above diagram, where the level of healthiness is 72 percent. We each have some room to improve our healthiness.  Room for improvement is our ‘unhealthiness’. As we grow healthier, unhealthiness shrinks.  As we grow less healthy, healthiness shrinks, and unhealthiness grows.

What happens when we get sick? Continue reading →

Today, we have Evidence Based Medicine, Science Based Medicine, Data Based Medicine, Instinct Based Medicine, Patient Based Medicine, Experience Based Medicine, Functional Medicine, disease based medicine, hospital based medicine, pseudo-evidence based medicine, and a jokes: Seven Alternatives to Evidence Based Medicine, Crap Based Medicine?  What’s going on?

What should medicine be based on? Health. We need:

Health Based Medicine.   Continue reading →

Health is whole, illness is a hole in your health. – The Healthicine Creed

It’s as simple to measure illness, as it is to measure a hole. We can measure the depth, the breadth, the growth rate, without reference to the whole around the hole. In some cases, a single measure can diagnose an illness – although in principle several are required. One of the reasons diagnosis is error prone is the fact that measurement of symptoms is simple. Measurement of illness is also simplified by the fact that we don’t need to ‘understand’ illness to diagnose it. We only need to detect it, and once it is detected, we begin to fight against it.

Measurement of healthiness is much more challenging. With an apple, for example, we can measure the health of the apple from an apple’s perspective, or from a human perspective, where apples are food. Healthiness can be measured in many dimensions.  We might measure the healthiness of the skin of the apple, is it of consistent depth and strength, does it protect the interior, is it clean and clear of pesticides, is it strong, does it protect the interior? We can also measure the health of the flesh.  Is it ripe? Is it bruised or beginning to rot or mould? For each measure of healthiness – we can define perfection, or 100 percent healthy, and then measure against perfection.

If the skin is 99 percent free of pesticides, then that aspect of skin health receives a score of 99 percent healthy, and one percent unhealthy. Each aspect of healthiness can be expressed as a percentage, because healthiness is whole. Healthiness includes the healthy score and the unhealthy score, which adds up to 100 percent, the whole score. Health is whole. Continue reading →